Once again, I use my old diplomatic passport to facilitate my entry into Pakistani territory.
No stopping by the embassy.
No grand hotel, where you're instantly spotted.
Instead, a little guest house on the road to the airport, right near the place where the cab was pulled over and I was forced to pay a bribe to the policeman during my first visit.
And, in case of questions or trouble, a brand new story: Quite apart from my "novel" on Daniel Pearl, I've come looking for a printing press and paper supplies for the new Afghan newspaper Nouvelles de Kaboul, since those things are not available in Afghanistan.
"Don't kid yourself," says Gul, my fixer from last spring who came to meet me in the lobby of the guest house, a small, smoke-filled room with cushions lining the walls, samovars of tea with milk on the center table, and the stuffed head of an animal on the wall. "Don't think they believe a word about your novel and, now, your paper for Afghanistan. They came to my place last June, after you left. They questioned my wife. Shut my kid in his room. Searched the whole house. They wanted to know what you did, what you were looking for, what I had told you, what you'd seen. They had me summoned by an old ulema at the other end of Rawalpindi, who gave me fair warning. You've got to be careful. They're everywhere."
The "they" he is talking about is the dreaded ISI, the Interservices Intelligence Agency, the Pakistani secret service that, in principle, as in every country in the world, should be concerned with gathering foreign intelligence. But since the Bangladesh war and the nationalist uprising in Baluchistan under Bhutto, and since the Afghanistan war and the Shiite upsurge resulting from the Iranian revolution, the ISI is increasingly inclined to expand its activities. In internal matters, it has an increasing tendency to substitute itself for the Intelligence Bureau, suspected of separatist sympathies. But Gul does not say "ISI." No one in Karachi ever says "ISI." They just say "they," or "the agencies," or "the invisible government," or even "the three letters," just "the three letters." Or even, when they can, they gesture with three raised fingers-as though the simple fact of saying those three cursed letters out loud was dangerous.
"Don't hold it against me," he says, glancing nervously at the man behind the reception desk, a timid, toothless, little old man with a round face who cannot possibly hear us at this distance. "I can't go on working for you under these conditions. It's not just a question of their visits, you know.... I had weird phone calls, incessantly, after you left, which, given the circumstances, is perhaps even more worrisome than all the rest. Here in Pakistan, when you get a call on your mobile phone, the caller is always identified. Except . . . "
The man from the reception desk walks over to us. He pretends to be arranging the cushions and asks us, in broken English, if we need anything. All of a sudden, Gul looks scared. His nostrils start to tremble, as if he were going to cry. What a new, strange way of talking to me without making eye contact! And now, while I answer the man from the reception desk, he stares at me, but surreptitiously, in fleeting, panicky glances. Clearly, something must have happened. This is not the same Gul I saw in the spring, cheerful and daring, casual and confident, ready to try anything, asking me about Reporters Without Borders, ready to be their correspondent if they asked him, making fun of paranoid journalists who saw bin Laden sneaking around every corner in Islamabad. The man from the reception desk returns to his post, and Gul continues.
" . . . Except when it's people from the army or the services. I got several calls this morning, and there was never anyone on the other end of the line, just breathing. And the number wasn't on the screen. That's why we must part ways. It's better for me. But I think it will be better for you, too. Would you like me to find someone to replace me? I've got an idea. His name is Asif. You'll see, he's a good man."
I'm thinking that Asif was the name of Daniel Pearl's fixer, and for some reason, that bothers me.
I'm thinking as well that Gul is probably right, and that the people from the ISI, if they are as well organised as everyone says, will probably think there's something fishy about my story of paper for the Nouvelles de Kaboul.
And then I think again about the two e-mails I received from him and from Salman, another one of my connections, this summer. In my absence, I had asked each of them to look for information on the bank accounts of the "jihadist" organisations outlawed by President Musharraf that Danny had been investigating when he was kidnapped. Salman had found me an informer who had immediately begun working on it, and Gul had recruited another. And then, an e-mail from Salman on July 25th: "My Karachi source has disappeared, I found out yesterday. He has been out of touch for several days. His family is very concerned, and so am I. I'll let you know when I have any news." And then an e-mail from Gul, on August 13th: "I was on vacation. Before leaving, I had given your e-mail to the journalist and asked him to send the material to you directly. When I returned, I learned he had a serious accident and so could not accomplish his mission. I am really sorry for this loss of time. Would you authorize me to deal with someone else? It will take me another ten days or so. Best."
It didn't register immediately; I didn't make the connection then, not between the two informers, and especially, not between them and me. But what if it was all related? What if someone was trying to prevent me from tracing Danny's path? What if, in other words, my story about a novel didn't fool anyone?
"No, no," I said, "not Asif. It's better in this case to be really careful and avoid someone they can eventually trace back to you. I know of someone, an old friend from the days when I was reporting about Bangladesh. He's not exactly a Bengali, he lives in Peshawar. I never really lost contact with him. He's one of those extraordinary fellows who, like you, saves the honor of this country. I'll call him."
Gul, both sorry and relieved, gets up and leaves. I watch him as he walks out to the street and melts into a crowd of pilgrims approaching a neighboring mosque, a head taller than all of them. Is it my imagination, or did I really see two men get up and follow him, the ones I had taken for passing shopkeepers who had come in to sit down at the far end of the room while we were talking?
I call my old friend Abdul, who works for a western NGO in Baluchistan and who, amazingly, is free for the next few weeks.
"Such a long time later," he says, in the same deadpan tone I remember, pretending not to be surprised at my call and taking up our conversation as if we had seen each other only yesterday instead of 30 years ago. "It's funny. What do you look like, after all these years? With me, it's my hair, you'll see. Give me two days to get there."
And so here I am alone, idle, wandering around to kill time, in chaotic, feverish Karachi, with its wet, smoky autumn sky, its rainy light, humming with rumors of last night's crimes or the latest adventures of the war between the Haji Ibrahim Bholoo and the Shoaib Khan gangs. Karachi is one of the only cities in the world where the mafia are so much a part of the mainstream of life in the city that their clashes, their incessant split-ups, their compromises, have the same importance as episodes of political life back home in the West.
Here I am in the souk of Lea Market in the north of the city; in the market of Little Bangladesh, in Ziaul Hoque Colony, where you can buy an adolescent Bengali girl for seventy thousand rupies (ten percent for the police). I'm in Sainab Bazar, the great cotton market, the best echo chamber, the best source, if you want to know what's going on and what's being said in Karachi.
Three hundred virgins arrived last night, via India, to be sold in Dubai . . .
The nocturnal fantasies of the "gunmen," the private security agents in orange caps you can hire for the day and who sometimes fight among themselves at night . . .
The results of a gangland killing they found this morning in the Karachi boat graveyard at Gadani: an entire family, father, mother, two grandmothers, three children including a baby, all dead, undoubtedly for weeks. The baby had been skinned and one of the old ladies quartered, the others crucified. The corpses had been left to rot in the hold of an abandoned and stripped tanker . . .
Danny again, still Danny, the invisible trace of Danny every moment, with every step-did he come by here? Or here? Or why not here, in front of this fishmonger who gives me pleading looks, like a beggar? Or here, on Jinnah Road, before Binori Town, the grand mosque where Omar spent so many long hours in the days before the kidnapping and that I cannot imagine escaped Danny's radar.
And then this other bit of news I don't imagine attracted much attention in France but that everyone is talking about here-last week, on the night of 10 to 11 September, the Pakistani police, backed up by the Americans, raided an apartment building in the residential neighborhood of Defence. They found computers with maps of American cities stored on their hard drives, and piloting manuals; some documents proving the presence, at the heart of command structure of al-Qaida, of three of bin Laden's sons, Saad, Mohammed, and Ahmed; they found and arrested ten Yemenis who had entered Pakistan illegally; and among them was Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mohammed Atta's roommate in Hamburg, who had planned on being the twentieth World Trade Center highjacker, but whose entry visa to the United States, like Zacariya Essabar, had been refused at the last minute . . .
"A victory for democracy!" says a rickshaw driver.
It's a defeat for the "dogs of al-Qaida," repeats the pistachio vendor before the Jinnah mausoleum, wagging his finger.
And the press, even if they're incapable of finding out whether bin al-Shibh has been sent to the United States to go to Guantanamo or if he is temporarily being held at the base at Begram in Afghan territory, call him "the first high official of the Organisation to have been neutralized since the arrest of Abu Zubaydah, at Faisalbad, in March."
I go there, to 63C 15th Commercial Street, in the middle of Defence, the residential area in the middle of the city where I remember-because it seemed strange to me-that immediately after independence, fifty years ago, most of the apartments were allotted to military personnel.
I don't really know what I'll find there.
For the moment, I don't see any connection with my investigation.
But I'm all alone, I have two days to kill while I wait for my new fixer, and so I decide to go see the neighborhood where the Pakistani police raided an al-Qaida hideout.
There is still a certain amount of activity there.
There are still a handful of journalists and onlookers, a squad of "gunmen" wearing black T-shirts marked "No Fear" in English, and a cordon of policemen guarding a metal barrier.
But life goes on. The Igloo ice cream shop across the street has reopened, and so has the real estate agency. Three men, naked from the waist up, white loin cloths floating on their skinny hips, their ribs and bony backbones showing under the skin, with long hair pulled back in pony tails-probably Christians or Hindus-are busy working on the sewer pipes that were damaged during the raid. A gang of children who are playing around the site hang on to me and ask if I know Leonardo DiCaprio. A teenager is filming me with an video camera. Another one asks if I want some black-market cigarettes. No doubt about it, a nice area. This is not one of those fleabag suburbs where I could imagine al-Qaida fugitives hiding. Approaching the apartment building where it all happened, recognizable because of the hundreds of bullet and grenade holes that have pockmarked the facade, I see a handsome, proper, four-story building with a rather well-to-do air, standing next to the local electricity company.
"Would you like a cup of tea?" an employee from the real estate agency asks, obviously happy to meet and talk with a foreigner.
The police, he tells me, started blocking off the neighborhood around three in the morning.
About twenty ISI agents positioned themselves around the building.
A little before nine, they arrested two Afghans who came out placidly to go to breakfast and they started yelling to alert their comrades who were still on the fourth floor.
At midday, after a fierce gun battle three hours long, with a hundred police reinforcements arriving throughout the morning, we saw a woman, two children, and ten men come out with their hands on their heads, all of them yelling "Allah Akbar" as loud as they could.
"How did we react?" he says with a guffaw. "Were we surprised? Oh, not at all, it wasn't a surprise to anyone. We saw them coming and going, and the lights on day and night. Everyone, starting with the police, knew that Arabs-well, in any case, people who did not speak Urdu-lived here in the neighborhood. There are embassy employees, and students of the madrasas. Why should we be suspicious of people who come to study here, friends, who do not make any trouble? How can you expect good Muslims to refuse hospitality to other good, God-fearing Muslims who do no wrong? So this place, like so many others, was known. We saw them going out to do errands every morning. Even the television came to see them two months ago, and the police were aware of it . . . "
Television? It turns out that he is talking about Yosri Fouda, star of Al-Jazeera, the Arab Bob Woodward, who last summer came to this apartment to interview not only Ramzi bin al-Shibh but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin Laden's right hand man. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: the shining star of the al-Qaida galaxy, a lover of the good life who, they say in Karachi, often travels by helicopter and makes a point of staying in only 5-star hotels, the mastermind of September 11, the inventor, a decade ago in Manila, of the genius idea to turn airplanes into flying bombs, the man to whom one of the kamikazes of the synagogue at Djerba would make his last phone call, just before going into action-in a word, the man whose capture American intelligence services said, six months before his arrest, they would prefer to that of bin Laden if given a choice, because he, and he alone, has "all the pieces of the puzzle."
Does one have anything to do with the other? Was the Al-Jazeera interview the provocation that set everything in motion? The man from the real estate agency doesn't know. He doesn't seem to think that receiving a leading journalist from Al-Jazeera is any more serious and compromising than going down to the street to buy milk and the morning newspaper, but in the end he doesn't know. Since then, I have verified that the interview, scheduled for 12 September, hadn't yet been broadcast when the Rangers stormed the building. But there were leaks. Al-Jazeera announced it. The Sunday Times of London had run some long extracts, as teasers. Fouda himself had talked about it. Here and there, he told how he got the scoop. He spoke about messages he had received in London, secret emissaries, clandestine meetings to plan things, Islamabad, Karachi, pass words, car changes and stealthy exits, a thousand and one details, each more fascinating than the last, leading up to the scoop- and how, finally, one finds oneself face to face in a big, empty apartment with two of the most hunted terrorists on the planet, who tell you, two days running, the real story of September 11, radical Islam's "Holy Tuesday."
In short, I do not believe the two events are unrelated, nor do I think they are automatically linked. And I can well imagine the Pakistani powers-that-be panicking when they suddenly realized that this damned interview was going to be broadcast in a few hours, and expose the fact that an al-Quaida cell (and what a cell!) was functioning with impunity in the heart of Karachi and known openly to the press-and deciding to take the initiative by staging a spectacular operation on the eve of the broadcast.
Fouda said it all, after his scoop: "If, as a journalist, I am able to reach these people, then why the devil don't the Pakistanis do so?"
But there are other strange details about this affair.
I hang around the Igloo ice cream shop and the real estate agency for another hour or two. I talk a while longer to the real estate agent, who is still fascinated by what's happened. I listen and observe, and I realize that there are a few more peculiarities that reinforce my feeling of unease and that fail to corroborate the ministry's communique about its grand antiterrorist operation, heroic and valiant and ultimately dangerous, that led to the pitched battle.
The fact, for example, that from what I can see, there seemed to be, coming from the fourth floor, little fire in return: a few bullet holes in the wall of the ice cream store, and signs of one grenade, maybe two, that seem to have exploded where the Hindus are now busy working. That's not much for the ferocious battle the police and the Rangers supposedly encountered.
Seeming to confirm this observation is the fact that, when the Rangers broke into the apartment, they found prayer books, documents, radios, computer equipment, blank computer discs, everything necessary for forging fake passports, and gigantic Allah Akbars written on the walls in blood. But instead of the expected weapons cache, instead of the arsenal described in this morning's edition of Dawn: one Kalashnikov. Only one. The man from the real estate agency is adamant. He spoke with the police, and then he spoke with the people responsible for putting the police seals on the building, and he can certify that they found, in all, one Kalashnikov-not much for the den of the Devil.
Mohammed-the fearsome and mysterious Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He was the one they were looking for, the big fish. I repeat that the entire FBI believed that if they could only interrogate one person from bin Laden's inner circle, or only put away one al-Qaida leader, including bin Laden himself, it would be Mohammed. But he's not there on that day. Usually, he was there, the real estate agency employee told me, he was there every evening, like the others, and we'd see him come and go, because it was his place. But, as if by chance, he is the only one who did not come home the previous night-and so he escaped. Was that really by chance? Indiscretion? A leak?
The children. Among those arrested were two children. But I discover- it's in the papers-first of all, that they are Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's children. Secondly, it's obvious the police know this because General Moinuddin Haider, Minister of the Interior, announced it to the press right after the operation, adding, in a burst of lyricism: "We are holding them. We are not turning them over to anyone. And we will get Khalid." And thirdly, today's news-the police released the children yesterday morning, supposedly for "humanitarian reasons," thereby giving up their only apparent means of tracking down the architect of September 11.
The date. The operation takes place on the date of September 11. The eve of the Al-Jazeera broadcast of an interview that's no longer a secret and is obviously going to make a huge splash. But really, one cannot help but think that it is also the September 11, and that to launch such an operation against the brains behind the September 11 attacks on the very anniversary of those attacks is something of a miraculous coincidence. If they had chosen this date, if they had known that an al-Qaida cell was there, if they had decided to wait before revealing it, and dismantling it, until this symbolically and politically significant and media-tailored day, they could not have done better. It was as though the Pakistani authorities, once again, had arranged and calculated everything. As though they wanted to send a very clear, strong message to their American ally. Happy Birthday, Mr. President! What do you think of this thoughtful and subtly planned anniversary present?
And then finally, the essential, not only the most bizarre, but the most incredible and, for me, the most dramatic turn of events that will relaunch my entire investigation: among the "Yemenis" arrested (whether or not they have been turned over to the Americans I have been unable to determine), among the "Arabs" who walked out in single file shouting "Allah Akbar" (in reality, only eight Yemenis, since there was an Egyptian and a Saudi), among these ten "terrorists" (a man from the electricity company is talking now, as the ice cream seller watches and the real estate agent nods his head solemnly) "was the American journalist's assassin," the real one, the one who held the knife.
I ask him to say that over again.
What journalist? I ask.
I press him: "You're talking about the Wall Street Journal reporter, the man whose throat was slit at Gulzar e-Hijri, Daniel Pearl?"
Yes, that's who he's talking about.
He seems to be saying, I don't see what you're getting so excited about. Other people in this world have had their throats slit! Other journalists have died. Do they have to be Americans for the West to take an interest? Does he have to be a Jew to suddenly become more important than thousands of Kashmiris, of Palestinians, who die every day from Indian or Israeli bullets? A double standard . . . You are hopeless . . .
He takes a key out from under the counter, opens a cupboard behind him and takes out a photo of a charred little body, hunched over and curled up, lying in a green, green field. "My cousin, in Kashmir, the war against the Indians. Did the Zionist newspapers print this photo of my cousin?"
In any case, the fact of the assassin's presence is there.
It is, indeed, what these men are talking about.
I've been here for three days. Every day I read the Pakistani press and listen to the radio and watch the television, but nowhere and at no time have I heard this story mentioned. I had to come and hang out here, between an ice cream shop and a real estate agency, to learn this astounding piece of news.
If they are telling the truth, it means that: 1. for the past week the authorities have had in custody the man who held the knife that killed Daniel Pearl; 2. rather than boasting about it, as one might expect, rather than crowing from the rooftops the great news of a political victory, as well as a victory for the police, they say nothing about it-nothing spectacular, a news story like any other, no reason to put it on the front page; 3. the man, in any case, lived here for at least a month, if not two months, in this neighborhood infested with former military men and crawling with police-this mysterious criminal, this killer the police scoured the country to find, was quietly going about his business in one of the residential quarters of the city.
Three pieces of information in one.
Three odd facts that, to put it mildly, leave me perplexed.
That's enough to make me want to rethink the whole affair, but this time, starting from the other end-that of Omar's accomplices, those other actors in the drama who were as responsible as he was for bringing this crime to its denouement and who, until now, I have neglected.
CHAPTER 2 PRESS REVIEW.
The first thing I do, as soon as Abdul arrives, is to hurry to the nearest library's reference room.
No matter which one.
No matter, either, the real name of Abdul, the old, former journalist converted to rights-of-man advocate whom I picked up at the train station early in the morning and who, from now on, is my companion. Ah yes, the old former journalist . . . thirty-two years have passed since the time of our red India . . . thirty-two years since our good-byes on the last line of the front, at the very end of the Indo-Pakistani war-the trucks of Yahya Khan's army took him back to Pakistan, and I rode on to Dacca in those of the Indian army. I left a Maoist who had given me the opportunity to encounter the loony Indian pro-Chinese known as "naxalists." What remains of that young man, the joyous internationalist, impassioned and ingenuous, whose determination to question himself and his side became a ruling principal, leading to a lasting commitment to those "enemies of the country," those "traitors," the oppressed Bengalis? A voice, a flicker of regret in his eyes, a few familiar gestures, and beyond that, the old former journalist who, as he warned me, has lost his hair . . .
What's important now is that we shut ourselves up in this room panelled in wood like a terribly British club, with polished woodwork, threadbare carpet, and a long, oval table in the center.
Without revealing what we are actually looking for, but using the pretext of a study of sanitation in Pakistan's northern provinces, we have them haul out all the major newspapers from the last week, and then, week by week, all the way back until mid-May. English for me, Urdu for him.
And, gradually, painstakingly, we go over everything, down to the local news and the human-interest stories, looking for the unnoticed wire service dispatch, or the unsigned paragraph, giggling like children at the outlandish story about a fight between two fake doctors in Sadiq Town, near Quetta, or exclaiming over an absurd photo. We stop, tears in our eyes, and remember a similar scene thirty years ago in the library of The Times of India in Calcutta, where we used to go, like modern Fabrices at Waterloo, to look at the map and trace the battles we had watched but of which we understood very little. It brought to mind as well the paragons of those days, Jean Vincent, and Bernard Ullman, and Lucien Bodard, a mountain of a man, a little shy, standing in his underwear, in the hotel room at the Intercontinental at Calcutta, providing a continuous spectacle with his perpetual speeches and his magnificent volubility . . . We start from the top, taking into account every small detail: a proven method that has never failed me in all the stories I have covered over the past thirty years, including and especially in countries where the press cannot be considered entirely free. I've never encountered an enigma, or any extreme confusion, that attentive, critical reading of local newspapers, provided it is timely, failed to clarify to some degree . . .
First, the organization chart of the crime.
Up until now, I haven't given it much thought.
So I profit from this plunge into the archives, because it enables me to clearly identify the different cells among which Omar Sheikh divvied up the tasks of his crime.
The first cell's assignment was to arouse the journalist's professional curiosity and, on the pretext of leading him to Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, to persuade him to come to the Village Garden. That was Omar, of course. But it was also Arif, alias Syed Hashim Qadeer, director of a small madrasa in Ahmadpur East, already wanted for his alleged role in the murder of at least seven people in the Pakistani Punjab and known to have close ties to Harkat ul-Mujahideen. It was Arif whom Pearl initially contacted; according to Pearl's fixer in Islamabad, Arif was to lead him to Gilani, and he was also the one responsible for the liaison with Omar since he organised the meeting at the Hotel Akbar. The third member of this contact cell is Hyder, alias Imtiaz Siddiqui, a.k.a. Amjad Hussain Farooqi, real name: Mansur Hasnain, a veteran of the Afghan wars and a member of Harkat ul-Jihad-i-Islami, the other extremist group that, under a hail of American bombs and in armed combat against the Northern Alliance, paid the heaviest tribute of solidarity with the Taliban. In some wire stories from February, I read that, a year ago, using the pseudonym of Sunny Ahmed Qazi, he was the organizer of the plane hijacking of Kandahar. ("I owe him my life," Omar reportedly said after he was freed.) I read as well that he is the one Omar asked to make the last two phone calls to Danny on the afternoon of the 23 January to confirm the date at the Village Garden. He'll come up again in a moment in my research on cell number 3. But one of Hyder's neighbors told investigators he saw him returning to his village one day at the beginning of January, long before the kidnapping, accompanied by an Arab and a Pakistani who resembled Omar, which indicates that he was already in this first cell and a very early participant in the plot.
Second cell. This is the cell that helped Omar address the series of emails to Pearl to inspire his confidence and lure him into the trap. This is also the cell that scanned the photos of the journalist in chains, and sent them, along with the communiques claiming credit for the kidnapping, to the major national and international news agencies-the cell in charge of exterior relations. Three men, again. Three men to send two series of e-mails from one or two of the city's cyber cafes: Adil Mohammad Sheikh, policeman, member of an elite anti-terrorist unit and probably leader of the group; his cousins, Salman Saquib and Fahad Nasim, specialists-especially Fahad-in computer science. All three were veterans of the Afghanistan war and linked to Jaish e-Mohammed, the "Army of the Prophet"-the group that was outlawed by the Paistani government just days before the kidnapping on January 12. And Pearl's decapitation, according to the police, bears the group's signature. In 1999, the founders of the group killed poor Ripen Katyal in the same way, bleeding him like a pig in front of his fellow passengers in the forward cabin on the Indian Airlines plane that was hijacked to buy the liberation of Omar Sheikh and Masood Azhar. They're "brave," Omar said during their common trial, alluding to Salman Saquib's scar-covered body. They are "true fighters of Islam," he insisted: I knew them in the field, and, in lending their competence to the army of redemption I had raised, they accomplished a deed that pleased Allah.
Third cell. The largest. The one at the rendezvous at the Village Garden, that stayed with Danny right up until his execution. Seven men, eight if you count Hussain Farooqi, alias Mansur, who, apart from his role in cell number 1, was asked to stay with the other jailers and Danny for the duration of his captivity. There is Akram Lahori, the salar, or supreme commander, of Lashkar I-Janghvi, the fanatic Sunni group whose original leader, Riaz Basra, died in the first days of 2002, in circumstances that remain unclear. And Asif Ramzi, Lahori's right hand man and the head of the Qari Hye, a subfaction of Lashkar, that takes care of Arab fighters who came for the Afghanistan jihad and ended up in Pakistan after the fall of the Taliban. And Naeem Bukhari, a.k.a. Atta ur-Rehman, another one of the directors of Lashkar and the real boss in the Karachi area. He was at the Village Garden, too. He was the one on the moped leading the car with Danny in it, and the one who forced Danny to read the text for the video. Since Lahori, technically his superior, came and went from Gulzar e-Hijri, Bukhari took over as acting head of the operation, along with Hyder. And Fazal Karim, who fought with Bukhari in Kashmir and in Afghanistan and, during the kidnapping, chauffeur for Saud Memon, the proprietor of the house and the land. He also stayed until the very end and, in fact, he may be the only witness besides the executioners to the execution. Interrogated following his arrest in mid-May, he said in his deposition to the police, "I would go out and do it again; he was a Jew, an American; I feel great to be a part of the revenge against America." And Faisal, alias Zobair Chishti, Lahori's and Bukhari's enforcer, involved under their aegis in the most murderous operations of Lashkar i-Janghvi and brought into the plot at the last minute as a sort of strong man, in charge of close surveillance of the victim (the escape attempt by the window of the toilet, shot in the shins with the pistol, etc.). And then there are two more of whom I know nothing, except their first or last names: Mussadiq, a caretaker; and Abdul Samat, a student or former student suspected as one of the participant in the suicide bombing against the French engineers at the Sheraton on 8 May 2002, who seems, for the time being, to have been a sort of assistant to Hyder in charge of supervision of the cell.
And then, finally, the fourth cell. The actual killers. Those who, arriving at the last moment, held the knife and filmed the throat-slitting. Perhaps, as well, whoever called them on this last day with the order to carry out the execution and thus took responsibility for the denouement. Of him I know little, except, if he exists, his name, Saud Memon, and the fact that he is a rich and powerful Karachi businessman, landlord of the house in Gulzar e-Hijri. (I say "if he exists," because, according to another hypotheses, nobody made the call from inside the compound: rather, on the morning of the 30th, someone called from outside, announcing the arrival of the three killers and giving orders to allow them to "operate as they wish.") As for the killers, if they exist as well, I read that they are "Arabs" or "Yemenis" or "Yemeni-Baluchis," with the father from Yemen, the mother from Baluchistan, or the inverse. (And I say, "if they exist," because, according to another hypothesis, "the Yemenis" may have been invented out of thin air to confuse the investigators and hide the identity of the true perpetrators from cell 1 to cell 4, all actually Pakistanis.) I read that one of them, probably their leader, was walking through the village south of Islamabad with Omar and Amjad Farooqi at the beginning of January. I read also that an employee of a telephone shop, Ehsan, heard this person make a mysterious phone call to Canada, and say, "I will complete the mission." Who was the Canadian? Another sponsor besides Omar? One of Omar's clients? A financier? None of the articles say. And none of them say exactly what the Arabs looked like, or what organisation they belonged to. For one: the Jaish e-Mohammed of Masood Azhar . . . For another: the Jaish Aden Aben al-Islami, the Islamic army of Aden, based at Sanaa and directly linked to al-Qaida . . . And for a third, a group with ties to the Americans of Yemeni origin arrested in a Buffalo suburb at the beginning of January, a dormant al-Qaida cell in the heart of the United States . . .
This isn't an organisational chart any more, it's a labyrinth. One with signs sticking out everywhere, with Pashtun and Punjabi names, people with double, triple, quadruple identities, all of them like hedges barring entry into the heart of this shadowy world where Westerners have such difficulty identifying the different characters in the maze but where one senses, all the same, that something essential is being plotted. And enthroned in the middle, Omar, the poor man's Minotaur, planted behind a series of obstacles he has placed between himself and the truth.
And then, the September 11th arrest.
The man who may have been Pearl's executioner-one of the three Yemenis captured with bin al-Shibh in the anti-terrorist raid at Defence.
And, apart from the Yemeni, the exact status of the investigation, a rundown of all the arrests by the police or the FBI to date, seven months after the death of Daniel Pearl, and the question, in other words, of the effectiveness of anti-terrorist operations in Pakistan.
I follow the barely perceptible trace of the alleged Yemeni assasin and the confirmation of his arrest through numerous obscure corner-of-the-page news articles. His name is not mentioned. But Fazal Karim, taken by the police to the secret prison where the ten who were arrested at Defence are incarcerated, is reported to have positively identified him. Plausible. Who better than Karim, whose duty it was to control the victim during the execution, to tie his hands and then hold his head, could identify the face of the man who held the knife?
Of course I knew of the existence of Fazal Karim. During my first trip here, I had heard he was the one who, in May, had led the police and the press to the place at Gulzar e-Hijri where they found Danny's remains. But I had never really understood just when and under what circumstances he had been arrested. The answer is in an article in the 19 May edition of Dawn. Well, article is saying a lot, more like a filler piece. It revealed that he had been denounced by a certain "Mazharul Islam, alias Mohammad Omar Choto, alias Dhobi," whose name I had never run across before, and who was nowhere to be found in my organisation chart of the crime. This Dhobi was arrested in April in a shakedown in the Sunni underworld related to "sectarian" anti-Shiite murders of recent months. He had in his possession video cassettes dealing with run-of-the-mill criminal activities of Lashkar I-Janghvi, or so the police thought. Except that, on viewing the videos, they realized one was footage of Danny's decapitation, and that the man they had just arrested was in charge of distributing it to foreign press agencies.
In a 19 June edition of Dawn, and in the News of the following day and the day after that, I find reports that another group of men suspected of being involved in the car bomb attack in front of the Sheraton Hotel that killed eleven French engineers of the Direction des Constructions Navales of Cherbourg were arrested on 16 June. How many were arrested? How were they treated? What court tried them? The article doesn't say. But it does mention two familiar names among the group of "terrorists" and "gangsters" caught in the Sindh police "dragnet"- Naeem Bukhari, alias Atta ur-Rehmann, the man behind the camera who dictated to Danny what phrases he should say, and Faisal, alias Zobair Chishti, his accomplice, the man who accompanied the prisoner to the toilet and shot him in the leg when he tried to escape.
In a longer article published a week later in an Urdu weekly Abdul translates for me, I learn that, during an interrogation by Pakistani police who put aside the kid gloves (allegedly in concert with an FBI team), Bukhari and Chishti fingered Akram Lahori, their chief, who was immediately arrested. Of course, the article refers to the anti-French operation at the Sheraton and the June 14 attack on the American consulate, both Lashkar sponsored. And, of course, it doesn't mention the Pearl case. But we know Lahori was present at the scene of the murder and that, as Bukhari's "supreme commander," he may well have been at the top of the chain of command and consequently the one who took the ultimate responsibility, with Saud Memon, of calling the Yemenis and ordering the execution. So another important piece of the puzzle falls into place.
Omar himself must be added to the list.
One should also remember that the three members of Cell 2, the weak link of the chain, were arrested at the beginning of February when the FBI traced their e-mail address, [email protected], to a cybercafe in Gulistan e-Jahaur, a suburb of Karachi, from which most of the messages were sent, and then on to Fahad Naseem, who had made the mistake of operating from the hard drive of his own computer.
It's a good idea to be wary.
One must, as with the organizational chart, be extremely cautious about jumping to conclusions.
All the more so because, in addition to the vagueness of these reports and the problems of the press-its way of providing information without actually providing any, or of providing it only in dribs and drabs-you run up against the eternal problem of any investigation into Islamist groups or al-Qaida in particular: the extreme difficulty of identifying, just identifying, these masters of disguise, one of whose techniques is to multiply names, false identities, and faces.
Sometimes you think you're dealing with two men when, in reality, you're dealing with one who has two names.
Sometimes you think you're dealing with one man when, in reality, there are two using one name. Asif Ramzi, for example, is also the pseudonym of another terrorist, a resident of Muhammad Nagar in Karachi, who is also known as Hafiz or Chotto, Chotto being one of the pseudonyms of Mazhurul Islam as well, the latter also known as Dhobi, the man who had the cassette and led the police to Karim!
Someone like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has a mania about fake identities, has at least a dozen known aliases.